"Nobody outside France writes better about French history and culture in the late 19th century than Frederick Brown.... It is a period of artistic triumph and of political turmoil, the latter increased by the ferocity of a nation divided by defeat in 1871, and by a moral and religious schism that culminated in the Dreyfus Case. The names alone—Gambetta, Thiers, Eiffel, de Lesseps, Zola, Boulanger, Clemenceau—mark the richness of the era, with its fatal combination of dissent, pugnacity, fin de siècle bourgeois luxury and revolutionary art, all of it overshadowed by the thirst for revenge against Germany that brought France to enter the First World War, and the martyrdom of a whole generation, with such misguided enthusiasm. This is the world that ended in 1914 and that all of Europe would look back on with such nostalgia and regret; it is an epic piece of history on a grand scale, full of deeply disturbing resemblances to our own."—Michael Korda